Firefighters say fuel was cause of Sunday blaze at 838 La.

The whole house at 829 Ohio, especially the basement, reeked of gasoline, he said.

"I guess it was pulling the fumes inside," Dobbs said.

It had been a rough 24 hours for Dobbs and his family. A basement smoke alarm went off Monday night, apparently for no reason. On Tuesday, with crews still working nonstop to clear the area of gasoline leaking from some nearby underground source, Dobbs couldn't help but be cautious.

"Anytime something's underground and you don't know what it is, you're concerned," he said.

Firefighters with special meters measured the air in Dobbs' house and said it was OK.

Officials checked 43 other houses in the neighborhood for fumes Tuesday in the wake of a Sunday fire that destroyed an apartment house at 838 La., displacing the occupants but causing no injuries.

Firefighters said Tuesday that they had completed their investigation of the fire's cause, which they determined was leaked gasoline.

But how the gasoline got into the house was not so clear.

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838 Louisiana house fire

Mark Bradford, chief of Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical, said Tuesday that groundwater had carried "flammable vapors" into the basement of the home at 838 La. The vapors, he said, were ignited by a sump-pump spark or the pilot light on a hot-water heater or furnace.

The vapors, he said, came from the "service station at Ninth and Louisiana streets," referring to the Presto Convenience Store No. 25 at 602 W. Ninth St. The store is across the street west from the house.

"Our investigation is complete," Bradford said.

Ongoing process

But Sharon Watson, spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, cautioned against assuming the store's tanks were to blame.

Presto has been checking its tanks every hour since Sunday, but what about the other gas stations nearby? Have they been checking their tank levels? Even if they haven't stopped selling gasoline they can track how many gallons they've sold and how many gallons are left.

Seems to me that if all the underground tanks are not leaking then it may be coming from old, forgotten tanks somewhere, which is a bigger worry.

One day on the KU campus I watched five men looking at a video monitor while one guy was in a ditch they dug waiting for the other five men to decide what to do about what they were looking at. Or maybe they were deciding on where to go for lunch?

I know of a town of about 800 (rural kansas) where an old gas station was 60 years ago, and they dug up all the ground around it and put in a ground water test station which is just a enclosed trailer turned into a permenant structure, that is still there to this day.. and it was no where near any residences. Much less a town of this size.